War is Kind

Poem

Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind.
Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky
And the affrighted steed ran on alone,
Do not weep.
War is kind.

Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment,
Little souls who thirst for fight,
These men were born to drill and die.
The unexplained glory flies above them,
Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom

A field where a thousand corpses lie.
Do not weep, babe, for war is kind.
Because your father tumbled in the yellow trenches,
Raged at his breast, gulped and died,
Do not weep.
War is kind.

Swift, blazing flag of the regiment,
Eagle with crest of red and gold,
These men were born to drill and die.
Point for them the virtue of slaughter,
Make plain to them the excellence of killing

And a field where a thousand corpses lie.
Mother whose heart hung humble as a button
On the bright splendid shroud of your son,
Do not weep.
War is kind!

Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane, (born Nov. 1, 1871, Newark, N.J., U.S.—died June 5, 1900, Badenweiler, Baden, Ger.), American novelist, poet, and short-story writer, best known for his novels Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895) and the short stories “The Open Boat,” “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” and “The Blue Hotel.”

Stephen’s father, Jonathan Crane, was a Methodist minister who died in 1880, leaving Stephen, the youngest of 14 children, to be reared by his devout, strong-minded mother. After attending preparatory school at the Claverack College (1888–90), Crane spent less than two years at college and then went to New York City to live in a medical students’ boardinghouse while freelancing his way to a literary career. While alternating bohemian student life and explorations of the Bowery slums with visits to genteel relatives in the country near Port Jervis, N.Y., Crane wrote his first book, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), a sympathetic study of an innocent and abused slum girl’s descent into prostitution and her eventual suicide.

At that time so shocking that Crane published it under a pseudonym and at his own expense, Maggie left him to struggle as a poor and unknown freelance journalist, until he was befriended by Hamlin Garland and the influential critic William Dean Howells. Suddenly in 1895 the publication of The Red Badge of Courage and of his first book of poems, The Black Riders, brought him international fame. Strikingly different in tone and technique from Maggie, The Red Badge of Courageis a subtle impressionistic study of a young soldier trying to find reality amid the conflict of fierce warfare. The book’s hero, Henry Fleming, survives his own fear, cowardice, and vainglory and goes on to discover courage, humility, and perhaps wisdom in the confused combat of an unnamed Civil War battle. Crane, who had as yet seen no war, was widely praised by veterans for his uncanny power to imagine and reproduce the sense of actual combat.

Stephen Crane first broke new ground in Maggie, which evinced an uncompromising (then considered sordid) realism that initiated the literary trend of the succeeding generations—i.e., the sociological novels of Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and James T. Farrell. Crane intended The Red Badge of Courageto be “a psychological portrayal of fear,” and reviewers rightly praised its psychological realism. The first nonromantic novel of the Civil War to attain widespread popularity, The Red Badge of Courage turned the tide of the prevailing convention about war fiction and established a new, if not unprecedented, one. The secret of Crane’s success as war correspondent, journalist, novelist, short-story writer, and poet lay in his achieving tensions between ironyand pity, illusion and reality, or the double mood of hope contradicted by despair. Crane was a great stylist and a master of the contradictory effect.

Summary

The first stanza opens with the speaker beseeching a maiden not to weep, “for war is kind.” This opening sentence sets the bitter, ironic tone of the poem as the reader already knows that the brutality of war is the very antithesis of kindness. The speaker says that though the maiden’s lover was knocked down while his frightened horse ran on alone, she should not weep. The dramatic and chaotic image of a young man throwing “wild hands toward the sky” as he is killed sharply contrasts with the speaker’s dispassionate final line: “War is kind.”

In contrast with the intimate setting of the first stanza, the second stanza describes a battlefield setting as if from afar. One can hear the booming sound of the regiment’s drums. The speaker describes the young soldiers as “little souls” who are “born to drill and die.” This line portrays the soldiers not as powerful men in control of their own destinies but as pitiful figures who are powerless to change their fate. An “unexplained glory” flies high above the soldiers. This glory could refer to the flag or simply the abstract notions of valor and bravery that are associated with war. Either way, the fact that the glory is “unexplained” illustrates the futility of what the men on the battlefield are doing; there is no true purpose or real justification behind their battle. It should also be noted that the glory—whether it is a flag or simply the concept of glory—is not down on the battlefield with the men. It flies high above them, demonstrating how far removed the lofty ideals of war are from the physical horrors of battle. The stanza ends with an allusion to a great battle god who looks out over his kingdom, which we would reasonably expect to be full of warriors. Instead, his kingdom merely consists of the dead: “a field where a thousand corpses lie.”

The third stanza reverts to the same type of intimate setting as the first stanza. In it, the speaker asks a baby not to cry, mirroring the request of the poem’s opening line. After acknowledging that the baby’s father died violently in a “yellow” trench, the speaker reiterates that “war is kind.” As the color yellow is often associated with sickness or disease, the phrase “yellow trench” calls to mind a claustrophobic, unsanitary place, perhaps filled with sick and dying soldiers. The jarring contrast between the detailed description of the father’s traumatic death and the speaker’s unfeeling refrain only further highlights the bitter irony of the poem.

The fourth stanza returns us to the battlefield where the flag blazes ferociously with its bold crest of red and gold. Immediately following this patriotic scene is the line “these men were born to drill and die.” The speaker exhorts the flag to show the men the “virtue of slaughter” and to make plain the “excellence of killing.” In this stanza, the flag can be seen to represent society. While the previous stanzas have been focused on the brutality of war itself, this stanza points to the cruelty and indifference of a society that knowingly sends its young men to die and to kill others. It also points to the naivete of the young soldiers themselves, who are easily convinced that killing can be virtuous.

The poem’s fifth and final stanza reverts back to the intimate setting. The speaker implores a mother whose heart is “humble as a button” not to weep on the body of her son. The comparison of a mother’s love to something as insignificant as a button on a uniform represents the ways in which war trivializes and ignores the experiences of the individual. Indeed, the grieving maiden, baby, and mother are all met with the same phrase (“Do not weep / War is kind”), a response that does not acknowledge the unique nature of their loss. The son’s shroud (a cloth used to cover the deceased) is described as “bright” and “splendid,” a juxtaposition that points to the tendency to gloss over grief and suffering by characterizing the death of a soldier as heroic or valiant. Even the structure of the poem serves to ironically show the contradictions in society’s view of war. The highly ordered and repetitive structure of the poem has an almost militaristic feel, despite the emotional and chaotic subject matter. This highlights the irony of our tendency to filter the indescribable devastation of war through such an artificial and dispassionate lens. Though the idea that “war is kind” is blatantly contradictory from the beginning, this poem makes us question the integrity of more widely accepted narratives about war: that there is glory in battle, that it is virtuous to fight, and that it is heroic to die.

Theme

Natural Law

In “War is Kind” Crane emphasizes the psychological torment that dying soldiers and their loved ones endure instead of focusing on their heroic or patriotic behavior. He desires to present the world as he sees it rather than the way he wants it to be. Much of Crane’s poetry and fiction depict how human beings behave in extreme circumstances, whether that be how the impoverished survive on the streets of New York City, how men in a lifeboat interact when faced with the prospect of drowning, or how soldiers behave while bullets and shrapnel flies around them. His deterministic philosophy, a feature of naturalism, is evident in the graphic ways he represents the soldiers’ deaths. They die alone, fearful and full of rage, in a field “where a thousand corpses lie.” Unlike some of his prose work which attempts to render humanity with a more detached, scientific eye, “War is Kind” also makes a moral judgement about the seeming “naturalness” of war, the speaker implicitly ridiculing the regiment which teaches the soldiers “to drill and die” and “Point[s] for them the virtue of slaughter.” This judgement suggests that in this work, at least, Crane sees the possibility that things could be different. Although sympathetic with the suffering of the dying, he is outraged at the institutions which sanction war, in this case the military itself, represented by the regiment, which “make[s] plain … [to the soldiers] the excellence of killing.” He expresses this outrage in his bitterly ironic refrain that “war is kind.”

Patriotism

“War is Kind” implicitly questions the usefulness and validity of patriotism as an attitude and an ideology. The flag, an emblem of national pride which the speaker calls “the unexplained glory,” flies above the soldiers marching to their deaths on the battlefield. Its “unexplainedness” points to the speaker’s belief that it cannot be explained because there is nothing rational about men fighting and dying for a symbol. As a symbol of national identity and military authority, the flag commands respect. However, Crane represents it as a marker of fascistic might which demands total allegiance. Under the flag, soldiers are taught “the excellence of killing” and “the virtue of slaughter.” Assigning such sinister motives to a country furthers the idea that patriotism is not only an act of blind obedience, but that it is reserved for those who do not have the ability or capacity to questions what being loyal to one’s country really means. Crane highlights this idea when he says that such adherents to the flag “were born to drill and die,” suggesting that there was never any other choice for them. Patriotism was a strong influence in Crane’s time as it is today. In its extreme and most public form, it fosters an almost militaristic devotion to the decisions a country makes, wrong or right.

Style

“War is Kind” is Crane’s free versemeditation on war and loss. The poet utilizes concrete imagery and irony to compose a portrait of the cosmic futility of war. Concrete imagery describes the world in terms of the senses, what we experience with our sight, taste, touch, smell, and hearing. By appealing to our senses, Crane can more effectively show the horrors of war directly. Tactile imagery is especially prevalent in the poem and highlights the horrific effects of battle on the human body. The tone of his descriptions is ironic, that is, he does not mean that war is kind, but that it is cruel and unjust. Another example of irony occurs in the second stanza when the speaker says “Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom …” It is also ironic that war’s “kindness” means that the soldiers’ deaths bring them release from their suffering.

The poem employs two levels of diction, or word choice. The language of the first, third, and fifths stanzas is plain and closer to everyday speech, while the language of the indented second and fourth stanzas is embellished and inflated, and uses more formal verse conventions such as end rhyme. The contrast between these two styles adds to the poem’s complexity, and furthers the author’s intention to deflate the idea of romantic heroism in all of its guises.

Analysis

The poem opens in tone of consolation: “Do not weep maiden..” which is immediately followed by the cutting lines: “for is kind”. This is both ironic and sarcastic. Next, the poet presents to us the graphic image of a man who throws his hands wildly at the sky. If not for the verb “throw”, it might remind us of somebody praying to God. The man on horseback must have been shot and after loosing control, he fell down and the scared horse ran alone. The frantic gesture of the dying soldier brings home the gritty reality of war with a shocking effect.

The second stanza begins with the “hoarse, booming drums of the regiment” with its deafening onomatopoeic effect. Those days drums were used to herald the advancing troops,may be to boost their morale. The next two lines bring out sad fate of the soldiers who are engaged in war:

Little souls who thirst for fight,
These men were born to drill and die.

Instead of glorifying the soldiers, as in patriotic poems such as Rupert Brook’s “The Soldier”, the poet, in this poem refers to them as “little souls”. The poet’s tone here is sympathetic and it contrasts with the traditional image of the soldier as a tough dare-devil type of man. The next line with its strong alliteration of “d” sound in “drill and die” suggest the dispensable nature of their doomed lives. In other words, they serve as pawns in the hands of the rulers with vested interests. The next line carries ironic overtones:

The unexplained glory flies above them

Glory is personified as an unreachable and fleeting phenomenon as the soldiers would never experience the so called “glory” while they live. The contrast between the ideal and the real nature of war is nowhere so evident as in the following lines:

Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom
A field where a thousand corpses lie.

The first line with its strong alliteration of “g” sound suggests the pomp and greatness of war especially with the allusion the Mars, the Roman God of War or the “battle-god”. However, the next line creates a totally different scenario of corpse-strewn landscape, which reminds us of a similar scene in Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade:

“Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred”

The 3rd stanza is addressed to a baby whose father had died in war:

Do not weep, babe, for war is kind.
Because your father tumbled in the yellow trenches,
Raged at his breast, gulped and died,
Do not weep.
War is kind.

The way the soldier dies here is no less horrible than the death of the soldier in the first stanza. The first world war was mainly an underground warfare as soldiers were fighting from trenches. The conditions of the trenches were appalling and many soldiers died of diseases rather than from war. The “yellow trenches” bring out the unhealthy conditions of the trenches. The excruciating pain suffered by the dying soldier is conveyed through the verbs “raged” and “gulped”. This gruesome scene brings out the cruelty of war in no uncertain terms. These lines also echoes Dulcet Decorum Est:

“He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning”.

This is immediately followed by the sharply ironic lines “Do not weep/War is kind”.

The next stanza takes us to the battle field again:

Swift, blazing flag of the regiment,
Eagle with crest of red and gold,
These men were born to drill and die.
Point for them the virtue of slaughter,
Make plain to them the excellence of killing
And a field where a thousand corpses lie.

The regimental flag with its golden crest seems to symbolizes the spirit de corps and heroism of war. The next line, however, conveys the stark reality of war as, according to the poet, the soldiers are just born to “drill and die”. This sudden fall from the sublime to the banal is called bathos or anti-climax. The next two lines with “virtue of slaughter” and “excellence of killing” are also laden with heavy irony. The ghostly panorama of “a field where thousand corpses lie” again highlights the grim reality of war.

The final stanza with the image of a mother mourning his dead son provides an appropriate conclusion to the poem:

Mother whose heart hung humble as a button
On the bright splendid shroud of your son,
Do not weep.
War is kind.

The heavy alliteration of the “h” sound in the first line creates sense of heaviness of heart felt by the mother. The simile “humble as a button” is somewhat surprising and it links with the “shroud” in the next line. It is “bright and splendid”, thus suggestive of a ceremonial funeral. In other words, the soldier is glorified after his death as one who laid down his life for the country and against this aura of glorification, mother’s love has become insignificant like “a button”.

The poem ends with the cutting lines:

“Do not weep
War is kind”

which runs like an ironic refrain throughout the poem.
Like most poems about war, this poem too brings out the cruelty of war and its miserable aftermath in telling imagery. The ironic style used in the poem reminds us of other war poems of the genre such as “blowing in the wind”, “Dulcet decorum est” etc.

Poetic techniques

Syntax/Word

Throughout the poem, Cranes uses phrase that emotionally heavy to appeal to the readers emotions. An example of this appeal to the reader’s emotion is “mother whose heart hung humble as a button”. This appeals to the readers emotions because even though the mother’s child has passed away she is still humbled because he died fighting for something he believed in. Also Crane’s uses of the maiden and babe, allow the readers to realize that he has written the poem for a female. Crane could be writing this for a female due to the majority of the time, in which the poem was written in, only men were allowed to fight in wars. Women were forced to stay and care for the children and houses.

Imagery

Throughout the poem, Crane uses specific imagery to allow the reader to visualize that he is discussing. The first imagery in the poem, is the “affrighted steed ran on alone”. This imagery is used for the readers to picture a frightened horse running extremely fast by itself. In times of war, it was a common thing for regiments to see horses run around by themselves because the rider was murdered in action. The second piece of imagery Crane uses in his poem is the booming drums of the regiment. By using this imagery the readers can visualize the regiment lining up to fight with the booming drums playing their “theme song”. A field where a thousand corpses lie is another form of imagery, used. By using this imagery can better understand that war is not really kind because thousands of individuals die and are left to rot in fields. The last image that the reader can visual is a troop dying. Readers can visual this because Crane specifically describes his death, “raged at his breast, gulped and died”.

Figurative

In order for the readers to realize that Crane uses figurative language in the poem, they have to closely analysis it. In the second stanza, gives glory animal characteristics. Glory cannot fly therefore the Crane gave glory the characteristics of a bird. The finally form of figurative language used in the poem is a metaphor. The metaphor compares the regiment to an eagle. By comparing the regiment to an eagle, the readers can analysis that Crane believes that they soldiers are strong and brave.

Tone

After closely analyzing the poem, readers realize that the tone of the poem is sarcastic. The tone is sarcastic because throughout the poem Crane says that war is kind but within the stanzas Crane does not use facts to support this claim. The imagery and word choices help the reader analyze the sarcastic tone in the poem. An example of imagery that applies to sarcastic tone is line fourteen through sixteen. In this lines Crane describes a soldier dead, however, in the follow two lines Crane says don’t cry because war is kind. Nothing about men sacrificing their lives to fight in a war is kind.

Theme

After closely analyzing the poem, the readers can come to the conclusion that the theme of the poem is that war is really not kind at all. Readers can come to this conclusion by analyzing the word choices, imagery, and tone. Since the tone of the poem is sarcastic, the readers can conclude that when Crane mentions that war is kind, he really means the opposite. Also the imagery that Crane provides throughout the poem represents all the horrid aspects of a war.